THE END.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] All attribute to themselves the glory of success; reverses they impute to only one.
[2] The above details of the torture of Cornelius De Witt, who had the fortitude to recite this strophe in the midst of atrocious sufferings, are scrupulously exact. See Basnage, History of the United Provinces, vol. II, p. 171.
[3] For letters written by eye-witnesses of these atrocities, see Basnage, History of the United Provinces; Events of the Campaign of 1672, published at The Hague, 1675: The Cry of the Martyrs, published in the same city, 1673; etc., etc.
[4] It is simply impossible to give the shocking details of their disfigurement.
[5] Facts like these would seem incredible by their savage barbarity, did not authentic witnesses confirm them, almost daily, under the reign of the Grand Monarch. "The military constraint arrived in the town to the sound of bell and drum; then was furnished the melancholy spectacle of the house being demolished, the stones, the beams, the lumber, the iron publicly sold, because the owner had failed to pay his tax, etc., etc."—Vauban, La Dime Royale, vol. 1, chap. X. See also the New Code of Taxes, or the Collected Ordinances, Paris, 1761, article on Military Constraints; Forbonnais, Researches in Finance, etc.
[6] Even at the end of the Eighteenth Century women among the nobility still often wore masks, especially in the country, to preserve the freshness of their color from the tan.
[7] In the Sixteenth Century, all the chemists who were engaged in the search for the philosopher's stone, a myth then much in vogue, were dubbed "blowers," because of the continual play of their bellows in the operation of fusing metals.